Shot Forth Self Living [Expanded Edition]

Captured Tracks;
2012

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The Buried Life

Captured Tracks;
2012

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Sometimes reissues are about the general reappreciation of artists everyone seemingly already loves; other times they're attempts to reclaim work that might otherwise be forgotten or near-forgotten. In the case of Los Angeles' Medicine, whose early-1990s catalog has been given an extensive work-through by the Captured Tracks label as part of their Shoegaze Archive series, it's the latter: While the band found itself on Rick Rubin's American Recordings label at the time, major-label connections and random appearances such as a club scene in The Crow never translated beyond cult worship. It's cult worship that's being fed here, with two full albums each with bonus tracks and a separate disc of demos, live cuts, and rarities (a Record Store Day box set containing these earlier this year also included an expansion of a further EP, Sounds of Medicine, into a full-length vinyl release plus a cassette tape documenting various live appearances). But there's a third kind of reissue logic that can occur, not due to the label but due to the listener: the one when your current self looks at your past conclusions and either wonders what you were thinking or goes, "You know, I'm still right."

So cards on the table in my case: For the longest time, I've been a fan of Medicine's main guitarist, sometime vocalist, and general lead figure Brad Laner for everything else he's done (and he's done a lot over three decades, solo and with others, from genteel home recordings to extreme dark feedback ambience and back again). But as a young L.A.-based shoegaze freak when it all first hit two decades back, part of an ill-defined community thriving on varying mixes of Anglophilia, raves, and psych revivalism, Medicine itself was a band I detested-- one of several, granted, but because of my passion for anything even remotely shoegaze, my main one. I saw one of their first shows opening for Chapterhouse, and they bored me senseless. They opened for the Rollercoaster U.S. touring bill with the Jesus and Mary Chain, Curve, and Spiritualized, and I was in agonies. A couple of years later, Swervedriver made one of many great L.A. appearances and... yep, them again. What I heard of their studio work irritated me at best; any claims made for their being as good as the UK types made me bang my head against a wall.

Listening to all this again with distance and time under my belt is the kind of healthy exercise I should have done some time ago, something all listeners probably should do with their own comparative examples, a necessary reexamination of prejudices as much as it never hurts to reconsider fandoms. The end result's one of the more enjoyably frustrating experiences I've had in a while, in that on the one hand I can pretty readily tell you exactly why the work of Laner, singer Beth Thompson, and percussionist Jim Goodall, plus various associates and earlier bandmates, is worth investigating. Yet at the same time it often still seems somehow to not quite work, an assemblage of often-excellent parts that never gels into a whole but gets close.

For instance, Shot Forth Self Living, the band's 1992 debut, feels more like a collection of experiments than a fully cohesive release. Laner takes the initial lead vocal on "One More" and crops up here and there throughout, but it's mostly Thompson being the main voice, sweetly caught between lyrical directness and being lost in the mix over performances that set a woozy but steady pace. Occasionally things get stripped down a little, but usually to showcase the core combination of Laner's central riffs, twisted patterns that sound like they're cutting through honey-- "Christmas Song", which concluded the original album, shows this to a T-- and through Thompson's contemplations. Songs like "Sweet Explosion" and "Aruca", especially thanks to the rhythms, sound like they're rubbing shoulders as much with Madchester hangovers-- think very, very early Blur-- as much as, say, "Soon", and not exactly successfully. But things can still connect just fine when Laner and crew completely go nuts: The appropriately titled "Queen of Tension", which seems to breeze along calmly until a dropped burst of drumming, insect sounds, and at least two freakish guitar solos on top of each other, stands out here.

With The Buried Life, Medicine's path ended up matching contemporaries Curve's to a striking degree; like the UK band, Medicine followed up their debut with a stronger second album in 1993 with greater overall variety leading the way. "Slut" might as well be a Curve homage in itself, with the band finding a perfect mix of Goodall's dance-nodding percussion, Thompson's coolly dismissive singing, and Laner's guitar sounding like a circular saw looping through sheet metal. But the frazzled edges, nagging-in-the-ear guitar tones, found-sound samples, and sense of rough mantras as opposed to hyper-precision marks Medicine's work as more of its own beast, as much as even more direct accessability elsewhere. Vocal pop hooks on songs like "Babydoll" and the joyful-sounding clatter of "Never Click" are livelier, while "Something Goes Wrong" actually sounds a bit like John Waite's "Missing You" with a lot more feedback. And none other than art-pop lodestone Van Dyke Parks turns up with piano and orchestrations on "Live It Down" (as well as a bonus-track version of their almost-hit "Time Baby").

Regardless, the personal itches that Medicine seemed designed from the start to scratch ended up much more strongly satisfied elsewhere, from the pretty guitar violence of the still underrated Lovesliescrushing back then to the commanding charisma of School of Seven Bells now. Hearing these Medicine albums again is almost like encountering scar tissue that runs too deep, finding out something that could work still never exactly does.